Tiny Heroes on iOS has unique take on tower defense

In Tiny Heroes you don't play as the hero, but instead have to prevent them …

RPG heroes have a sense of entitlement. Whenever they see some gold—whether it's carefully hidden in a vase or safely tucked away in an unguarded treasure chest—they simply take it. But obviously that's somebody's money, and in Tiny Heroes it's your job to keep that treasure safe.

Though Tiny Heroes looks like a fairly standard tower defense game, it cleverly borrows a few ideas from Plants vs Zombies to make it feel more robust and interesting. Throughout the campaign you'll be defending a number of different castles, each with their own layout. Heroes come in from the left, and you'll have to lay down traps to keep them from getting in and out with the treasure. As with PvZ, different heroes have different abilities and your defenses offer up plenty of room for trying different strategies. You'll have everything from spiked floor tiles and saw blades to animated treasure chests and angry orcs at your disposal.

Tiny Heroes

And just like in PvZ, you'll reach a point where you'll have to decide which defense items you want to take into battle. The list grows pretty large and so you can have wildly different set-ups depending on your choices. The thing about your defenses, though, is that they're pretty weak. It seems as though the heroes are almost always stronger, and so you'll regularly have to replace destroyed booby traps. It's not about building up an impenetrable wall but instead just getting by with what you have.

Purple crystals replace the sunflowers from PvZ, providing the mana necessary to build new stuff. So unlike most TD games you don't get anything for killing enemies, which makes having a good layout of crystals just as important as having a solid defense.

Tiny Heroes really is more of a clever game than it is an original one. The premise is a fun twist on the standard video game hero's tale, and the game smartly combines elements found in other games. It's also got plenty of goofy charm, which shouldn't come as a surprise since it's from the same team that brought us Fantasy University on Facebook. Most importantly though, it's fun, and doesn't feel like every other TD game out there.

Usually the limited time introductory price of iOS games is free or 99 cents. I like tower defense games, yes still, and playing the villain is usually what I do in choose your fate style games but I kind of set a mental cap for my temporary minute wasters and that cap is 99 cents. It can also be implied that the downloadable content will be at an additional cost. Its "downloadable content" and not "updates with additional content."

The arguments that $3 isn't a lot isn't valid when there are THOUSANDS of other titles available. It can get expensive when you have so much good stuff to play. You have to draw the line somewhere. For me, that line was drawn at 99.

(UPDATE: Its 99 cents now. I bought it though I'm still not going to pay for any DLC on a mobile game.)